When planning your content marketing strategy, do you think through multiple ways you can use any single piece of content? If not, you should. By repurposing your content for multiple channels or formats, you can more effectively meet the needs of your audience while also balancing your team’s resource constraints, making it a winning strategy for any content marketer—if approached the right way.

This week, the #ContentChat community discussed the value of reusing content and traded tips on how to effectively recycle content without seeming stale. Read the recap below, and use #ContentChat on Twitter if there is a piece of content you’re trying to repurpose and would like the community to share ideas.

Q1: Is upcycling, recycling, or repurposing content a consistent component of your content strategy? If not, why not—what has been holding you back?

Let’s kick things off with some clarification. For today’s chat, upcycling/recycling/repurposing means taking a piece of content in its original form and then turning it into something else.

Would you mind clarifying upcycling, recycling or repurposing? Do you mean sharing the same content across social platforms, using it for BD purposes, in emails to new prospects, etc – OR taking big chunks of the content and spinning new themes from that into new articles, etc?

Repurposing content is an efficient use of your team’s time (especially if you’re a small team with limited resources), and you’ll likely see greater traction from your content if you are presenting it multiple ways.

A1a: Content reuse is always part of any project I pitch b/c if content was worth creating in the 1st place, it’s worth putting it to use in different mediums. #ContentChathttps://t.co/CNEAsLCYQP

A1: A good rule of thumb is that recycling is never a bad thing. If you can get more value our of your content without cheapening it, why not? Plus, if you put in good effort for the first piece, it should be solid enough to be repurposed plenty of times. #contentchat

Hard YES to content repurposing! This would definitely depend on your goals—but I love having a solid base of ‘evergreen’ content that can evolve over time and be both a great resource for our audience and a great driver of traffic 📈 #ContentChathttps://t.co/OVlJUfTiKc

Despite the inherent benefits of content recycling, there are several potential hurdles in the process. For example, you may not have access to the design resources needed, or your content may be spread across too many topics (making repurposing difficult as you are always moving on to a new topic).

A1b: When it comes to my own content marketing, I don’t do as much of this as I’d like, because I don’t have a designer as part of our team…yet! So we are limited to what @AlekIrvin and I can come up with in Canva, mostly. 🙂 #ContentChat

A1: I try to repurpose/re-share but admittedly not great at it. As a freelancer my work for the last 4-6 years has been spread across tons of different publications/sites which makes it more challenging. #ContentChat

A1 Currently, I’m not a content recycler but the idea of being able to use your content on multiple outlets has been appealing. I think what’s holding me back is figuring out which platform works best for me as a creative. #ContentChat

Q2: Why should creative reuse of your content be included in your content strategy?

You maximize the value of your content reuse by planning for it before you create the base content.

A2a: When you bake in the creative reuse of your content to your #contentstrategy, you can often save time and money upfront by having the same team create an entire suite of content using the same creative instead of a one-off piece now and something else later. #ContentChathttps://t.co/2ekHQMSrU5

This “value” encompasses a few areas. First, there is the financial side. Great content requires time, money, and team resources, and you can more efficiently repurpose a piece of content than you can create an entirely new piece. Plus, when you create multiple pieces of content around a central theme, you will likely see greater traction on each piece.

A2) Value maximization is pretty important. Clients and creatives spend a lot of time and money into creating good content and its utility should be worth the investment. #contentchat

A2: The sign of a well-oiled #contentmarketing strategy is low effort that leads to high [and valuable] output. Branching out and growing an audience is often as easy as repacking well-performing content so that it works on other channels. #contentchat

The reason you need to repurpose content is that your audience has unique needs and preferences on how to consume content. Create your content for different channels, formats, and angles to ensure a greater portion of your audience members can gain value from it.

A2b: But in addition to the WIIFM for the content marketer, repurposing your content from one type of content into another form also is valuable to your community, who may prefer a different content type for consuming your information than you first envisioned. #ContentChat

A2a: People consume and respond to content differently. Some of your readers may prefer a blog, others may prefer an infographic or podcast. It allows you to cast a wider net + get more bang for your 💰 +⏲️ #contentchat

A2. The goal of content reuse (besides reuse!) is really to reach people who haven’t or wouldn’t see it in it’s current format. Often you can reach an audience in other formats with slightly changed content. #ContentChathttps://t.co/SwzDJciSXx

Additionally, content repurposing can help your team keep up with the fast-paced media and content landscape.

A2: In the current media landscape it’s important to create fast content and it’s an easy to keep up by repurposing content. Also, by repurposing or up cycling content for different media outlets you are able to reach an audience you hadn’t with the original content. #ContentChat

If there is not an apparent way or need to repurpose your content, reconsider its value and assess whether it is actually serving your community.

A2c: And if you create content that doesn’t seem to lend itself to being repurposed, you may want to ask yourself if it is really serving the needs of your community, or if it’s more of a 1-time campaign and not part of a strategic content marketing program. #ContentChat

Q3: Are there any downsides to repurposing content?

There are downsides to repurposing content, and they largely depend on how much planning your team puts into your content reuse. Remember that the focus should always be on your audience—they aren’t as close to the content as you are as the creator, so their threshold for what feels stale will be different than yours.

A3a: Marketers can get bored with their topic and visuals (hence why brands redesign all the things with such frequency). So repurposing can feel a bit stale to you even if it feels fresh to your audience (who hasn’t seen everything you’ve ever produced, unlike you). #ContentChathttps://t.co/zw6Cohkj3v

The most common issue with repurposed content is if it sticks too close to the original content, which is not valuable for your audience. Content recycling is not a copy and paste exercise, and there needs to be a clear value-add of each piece of content you create.

A3: It takes time to reuse content well because you don’t want to just copy and paste. There’s some thought and editing involved. And that takes time. #ContentChat

A3: If you’re repackaging content for a variety of platforms you run into the issue of your presence feeling stale. You also have the issue where each platform caters to a different format. Content formatted to the platform it will be displayed on will do better.#ContentChat

Plan the cadence that you’ll release your repurposed content. If you slowly trickle out new content that is all very similar over time, it can start to feel repetitive. Either frontload the work so everything is released close to the same time, or take extra steps to further differentiate each piece of content.

A3b: Also, if you don’t repurpose the content into different formats that you make available all at once, it can start to seem like you are being repetitive as you trickle out the derivative content slooowwwwllllyyy over time. #ContentChat

Q4: What are some ways you typically repurpose your #content?

The community shares a multitude of ways you can repurpose your content below. Some highlights: Customer case study interviews can be used for video testimonials, written case studies, pull quotes, or presentation decks; Podcasts can be turned into blogs; Blog series can be packaged as an e-book or whitepaper; and basically anything can be turned into a graphic of some sort.

A4: When I do customer case study interviews, I like to do them over video then have them transcribed. I can create small video testimonial clips, a written transcript that can be used for a written case study, examples for PPT decks, and quotes for future content. #ContentChat

Blog posts are usually so value-packed that they can be repurposed into a multitude of content. Youtube video scripts, Twitter threads, Instagram captions. They can inspire social media conversions. The sky is truly the limit here. #contentchat

A4) Turning podcast and interview content into blogs or taking quotes from a blog and using it as an infographic post on social media. It’s all about translating useful info so new audiences can consume it in different ways and spaces. #contenchat

A4: Using the blog as the basis, I usually break it into social media posts, an infographic or two, and if I feel it’s warranted, a short video. For some clients, it also goes into a discussion forum to generate UGC. #ContentChat

A4: Most often, blog > social posts. Depending on the content, it may also go to a quick graphic for social (mini infographic) or a larger infographic. In some cases, a series of related blog posts that are produced around the same time > white paper. #contentchat

Q5: Do you have any favorite tools or resources that make it easy to repurpose your content?

There are plenty of tools to help you repurpose content. General categories include design tools like Canva…

A5: 1. Relentless editing. 2. @Canva, again, for designing the new content for social media channels and other types of media – infographics, banner ads, etc. The graphics are so pretty, and you can add your own logo, photos, etc.#ContentChat

Social media management tools like Meet Edgar…

A5: I don’t currently use one but have always wanted to learn @MeetEdgar or a similar “smart” social media curation app. They seem like excellent tools for repurposing. Open to recommendations if you have them! #ContentChat

A6 This blog post is just one of the 12+ pieces of content we’ve created, or plan to create, based on the main report (linked below). 10 trends = 10 blog posts + overview post + infographic. https://t.co/rttpupN6QX#contentchat

We released the report and overview post on the same day, then the infographic the next week, and every week thereafter we wrote a different post about one of the 10 trends. Wasn’t just a copy and paste; some additional work was needed for each individual post. #contentchat

I love that. I’ve done similar content projects for Meltwater over the years. The blog posts would use a topic from the ebook and greatly expand upon it so it still provided value on its own, vs being an excerpt. #ContentChat

Their free courses come with transcripts and powerpoint slides. Many of the modules are repurposed into high-value articles, and there are also videos that expand on them. https://t.co/ENE6k0HXWk#contentchat

A6: We did an industry survey at the end of 2019 and then took the results and created a whole set of blog content out of it. Some of it just reported on the results while others addressed issues our survey respondents brought up. https://t.co/hWOn9tV009#contentchat

I liked the way @airbnb had a magazine: https://t.co/Pfd0XOim6B it was great marketing for those of us who’d used the service – it gave us travel envy flipping through the pages & served as a motivator to travel again! But I believe they’ve dumped concept now (COVID) #contentchat

A2b. For example, @HarvardBiz takes top performing articles topically and publishes them in book form at the end of the year. People reading articles online are often a different audience from those consuming this content in book form. Or, like me, they may have missed something. https://t.co/JaGHp9FPg2